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The AmericanRevolution:
Revisions in Need of Revising
Edmund S. Morgan*
URING the past fifty years three ideas have inspired research into
the history of the eighteenth century in America and England.
'The earliest of these to appear, and the most fruitful of results,
was the idea that American colonial history must be seen in the setting off
the British Empire as a whole. We are all familiar today with the new
insightsand new discoveries that have grown out of this view: the great
worksof George Louis Beer and Charles McLean Andrews, the monu-
mentalsynthesisof Professor Lawrence Gipson, which now approachesits
culmination.This has been a great idea, and it has done more than any
otherto shape our understanding of the colonial past.
A second idea, which has affected in one way or another most of us
who study colonial history, is thai"the social and economic divisions of a
peoplewill profoundly influence the course of their history. This idea re-
ceivedearly application to-American history in Carl Becker's study of New
Yorkpolitics on the eve of the Revolution and in Charles Beard's An Eco-
nomic Interpretation of the Constitution. New York politics before the
Revolution,Becker said, revolved around two questions, equally impor-
tant,the question of home rule and that of who should rule at home.'
Subsequenthistorians have found in Becker's aphorism a good description
of the Revolutionary period as a whol4 The conflict between different so-
cial groups now looms as large in our histories of the Revolution as the
struggleagainst England. Like all seminal ideas, this one has sometimes
beenused as a substitute for researchinstead of a stimulus to it. Historians
have been so convinced of the importance of social and economic divi-
sions that they have uttered the wildest kind of nonsense, for example,
about the social and economic basis of a religious movement like the Great
Awakening of the 1740's. The view has neverthelessbeen productive of im-
portant new insights and new information.
The third idea, although it has had scarcely any effect as yet on the
study of American history, has furnished the principal impetus to recent
research in British history. It is a more complex idea, growing out of the
discoveries of Sir Lewis Namier. The effect of these discoveries as been
to attach afnew importance to local as opposed to national forces. 'It has
been the greatest of Sir Lewis Namier's achievements,"says Richard Pares,
"to exhibit the personal and local nature of political issues and political
power at this time."2 Namier and his disciples, of whom Pares is the most
notable, have destroyed the traditional picture of British politics in the age
of the American Revolution. During this period, they tell us, there were
no political parties in the modern sense, nor were there any political fac-
tions or associations with any principle or belief beyond that of serving
selfish or local interests. The Rockingham Whigs, who made such a dis-
play of their opposition to the repressive measures against the colonies,
were no different from the other squabbling factions except in their hypo-
critical pretense of standing for broader principles. And George III owed
his control over Parliament not to bribery and corruption but simply to
his constitutional position in the government and to his skill as a politician
during a time when the House of Commons lacked effective leaders of its
own.
Each of these three ideas, the imperial, the social or economic, and the
Namierist, has had a somewhat similar effect on our understanding of the
American Revolution. That effect has been to discredit, in different ways,
the old Whig interpretation.'The imperial historians have examined the
Rrunningof the empire before the Revolution and pronounced it fair. The
Navigation Acts, they have shown, were no cause for complaint. The
Board of Trade did as good a job as could be expected. The Admiralty
Courts were a useful means of maintaining fair play and fair trade on the
high seas. Indeed, Professor Gipson tells us, the old colonial system "may
not unfairly be compared to modern systems of state interference with the
liberty of the subject in matters involving industry and trade, accepting the
differences involved in the nature of the regulations respectively. In each
case, individuals or groups within the state are forbidden to follow out
lines of action that, while highly beneficial to those locally or personally
2Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, I953), p. 2.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 5
one can scarcely escape the feeling that the Americans were rather beastly
to have made things so hard for him.
While the imperial, the economic, and the Namierist approaches have
thus contributed in different ways to diminish the prestige of the Ameri-
can Revolution and its promoters, it is a curious fact that none of the
ideas has produced any full-scale examination of the Revolution itself or of
how it came aboultJThe imperial historians have hitherto been occupied
primarily in dissecting the workings of the empire as it existed before the
Revolutionary troubles. Although their works have necessarily squinted at
the Revolution in every sentence, the only direct confrontations have been
brief and inconclusive.
The social and economic interpretation has been applied more exten-
sively to different aspects of the Revolution, but surprisingly enough we
still know very little about what the social and economic divisions actu-
ally were in most of the colonies and states at the time of the Revolution.
Professor Schlesinger's analysis of the role of the merchant class4 remains
a fixed point of knowledge at the opening of the period, and Charles
Beard'sEconomic Interpretation of the Constitution is a somewhat shakier
foundation at the close of it, reinforced, however, by the work of Merrill
Jensen.5 Historians have bridged the gap between these two points with
more assurancethan information. There are, it is true, several illuminating
studies of local divisions but not enough to warrant any firm conclusions
about the role of economic and social forces in the Revolution as a whole.
After thirty years we are only a little closer to the materials needed for such
conclusions than J. Franklin Jameson was in I926.
The Namierist approach, as alreaodyindicated, has been confined to
events in England rather than America. Though the effect of such inves-
tigations has been to exonerate George III and discredit the English Whigs,
the Revolution has not been a primary issue for Namier or Pares. One
student of Professor Namier's, Eric Robson, made a preliminary excur-
sion into the subject but confined his discussion primarily to military his-
tory.6 And while Professor Charles Ritcheson has treated the place of the
The idea that they were narrow-mindedsimply will not wash. Nor is it
possibleto see them as the dupes of their intellectualinferiors.Samuel
Adams,PatrickHenry,andJamesOtis mayperhapsbe castas demagogues
without seemingout of place,but not the giantsof the period.If the Brit-
ish governmentcould not run the empirewithout bringingon evils that
appearedinsufferableto men like Washington,Jefferson,JohnAdams,and
Franklin,then the burdenof proofwould seem to be on those who main-
tainthatit was fit to run an empire.
When the imperial historiansare ready to attempt the proof, they
must face a secondtask: they must explainaway the characterwhich the
Namierist historianshave given to the British statesmenof the perio&d
The Namierists,as alreadyindicated,have emphasizedthe parochialchar-
acterof English politicsin this period.They have cut the Whigs down to
size, but they have cut down everyoneelse on the Britishpoliticalscene
likewise.If Parliamentwas dominatedby localinterests,what becomesof
imperialbeneficenceand farsightedness?
The whole effect of the Namierist discoveries,so far as the colonies
are concerned,must be to show that Britishstatesmenin the I760's and
I770's, whether in Parliamentor in the Privy Council, were too domi-
nated by local intereststo be able to run an empire.There was no insti-
tution, no party, no organizationthrough which imperial interests,as
opposed to strictly British interests,could find adequateexpression.In
fact the Namieristview and the view of the imperialhistoriansaredirectly
at odds here: though neithergroup seems as yet to be awareof the con-
flict,they cannotboth be wholly right, and the coming of the Revolution
would seem to confirmthe Namieristview and to cast doubt on the im-
perialistone. The achievementsof the revolutionistsand the failuresof
the British statesmensuggest in the strongestpossibleterms that it was
the Americanswho saw things in the largeand the Britishwho wore the
blinders.If this is so, may it not be that the case for the beneficenceand
justiceof the BritishEmpirebeforethe Revolutionhas been overstated?
In responseto our argumentad hominem the imperialistsmay sum-
mon the aid of the economicinterpretationto show that the Americans,
howeverhigh-tonedtheirarguments,were reallymovedby economiccon-
siderationsof the basestkind. We may, however,call theseconsiderations
basic ratherthan base and offer our previouscharacterwitnessesagainst
the economiststoo. There is no time to plead to every indictmenthere,
but one may perhapsanswer briefly the strongestyet offered, that of
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 9
ferred from the single remark by which Beard characterized the man.
It cannot be said that the statements which Beard neglected are con-
cerned with an aspect of Sherman's views not relevant to the problem Beard
was examining: they are certainly as relevant as the statement he did
quote. His treatment of Pierce Butler, the delegate from South Carolina,
is similar. Beard notes that Butler held public securities and that he argued
for apportionment of representation according to wealth.10 He neglects to
mention that Butler, in spite of his security holdings, opposed full pay-
ment of the public debt, "lest it should compel payment as well to the
Blood-suckers who had speculated on the distresses of others, as to those
who had fought and bled for their country."1 The statement is relevant,
but directly opposed, to Beard's thesis.
It requires only a reading of the Convention debates to see that Beard's
study needs revision.12 But the trouble with the economic interpretation,
as currently applied to the whole Revolutionary period, goes deeperf The
trouble lies in the assumption that a conflict between property rights and
human rights has been the persistent theme of American history from the
beginning.)It was undoubtedly the great theme of Beard's day, and Beard
was on the side of human rights, where decent men belong in such a con-
flict. From the vantage point of twentieth-century Progressivism, he lined
up the members of the Constitutional Convention, found their pockets
stuffed with public securities, and concluded that they were on the wrong
side.
It was a daring piece of work, and it fired the imagination of Beard's
fellow progressives.13Vernon L. Parrington has recorded how it "struck
home like a submarine torpedo-the discovery that the drift toward plutoc-
racy was not a drift away from the spirit of the Constitution, but an in-
evitable unfolding from its premises." As a result of Beard's work, Par-
rington was able to see that "From the beginning ... democracy and prop-
erty had been at bitter odds."14
10 Beard,Economic Interpretation,pp. 8I-82, I92.
11 Farrand,Records, II, 392.
12 Robert E. Brown's Charles Beard and the Constitution (Princeton, 1956) ap-
peared too late to be of use in preparationof this paper, but the reader will find in
it abundant additional evidence of deficiencies in Beard's use of the Convention
records.
13See Douglass Adair, "The Tenth Federalist Revisited," William and Mary
Quarterly,3d Ser., VIII (I95I), 48-67; Richard Hofstadter, "Beardand the Constitu-
tion: The History of an Idea," American Quarterly,II (I950), 195-213.
14Vernon L. Parrington,Main Currentsin American Thought (New York, 1927-
30), III, 410.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION II
tectsof modern liberty. The task has not been wholly neglected. A num-
berof scholarshave been quietly working at it. I will not attempt to name
themhere, but their discoveries are sufficient to show that this is the direc-
don which scholarship in colonial history should now take and that the
rewardswill not be small